Firing of HIV/AIDS advisers worries activists

Move is raising concerns that the Trump administration isn’t fully committed to eradicating the epidemic

After almost a year in office, President Donald Trump still hasn’t appointed a director for the White House Office of National AIDS Policy. He proposed cutting millions of dollars from HIV and AIDS prevention programs.

But for some activists, the final straw came last week when Trump fired all the remaining members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS — months after a half-dozen members resigned in protest over the administration’s policies.

Being dismissed “feels like retribution,” said Gabriel Maldonado, the executive director of a HIV prevention group in Riverside and one of the members who was let go last week. He and others had previously publicly criticized the proposed budget cuts.

The Trump administration played down the dismissals, pointing out that President Barack Obama appointed his own slate of members after he took office in 2009.

“Changing the makeup of federal advisory committee members is a common occurrence during administration changes,” Kaye Hayes, the executive director of the council, said in a statement. “The Obama administration dismissed the George W. Bush administration appointees to PACHA in order to bring in new voices.”

The dismissed members were invited to re-apply for their posts, and a new council will be convened later this year, Hayes said.

But advocates see a marked difference between the actions of the Obama admin-

“We’re worried it could be yet another signal that this president and this administration are de-prioritizing HIV at a time when we’re making very significant progress in reducing the number of infections.”

— Ernest Hopkins, the director of legislative affairs at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation

istration, which came into office after campaigning on launching a national strategy to fight HIV/AIDS, and the Trump administration, which they argue hasn’t paid much attention to the epidemic.

“Obama was moving people in to do a job that he had promised to do,” said Scott Schoettes, a lawyer with the LGBT advocacy group Lambda Legal who resigned from the council earlier this year. With the Trump dismissals, “it’s more about not wanting to hear from the people who were there,” he said.

The council was created by President Bill Clinton in 1995 to bring doctors, researchers, activists and nonprofit leaders together to advise on HIV policy. It’s helped shape a national strategy to combat the disease, which over the last three decades has transformed an HIV diagnosis from a death sentence to a manageable illness.

Maldonado, who had served on the board since May 2015, said he and other members received letters via FedEx informing them of their dismissal “out of the blue” last week. He wondered why the firings didn’t take place shortly after Trump took office last January.

“It seems like they want to bring in their own people, who operate within their own (conservative) ideological framework,” said Maldonado, who is HIV positive.

The pink slips come as the advisory board has hemorrhaged members in recent months. Six members resigned in June, denouncing the administration’s proposed budget cuts in a Newsweek op-ed.

In past years, the council has helped create a helpful “cross-pollination” between people working on different facets of the epidemic, said Bishop Yvette Flunder of Oakland’s City of Refuge United Church of Christ. She was appointed to the council by Obama before resigning in February.

Flunder, whose husband died from HIV complications and who has presided over almost 150 funerals of AIDS victims in her East Oakland congregation, predicted that the Trump administration would mount a “hostile and conservative takeover” of the panel, filling it with anti-LGBT members or advisors skeptical of using condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV.

Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 would slash $150 million from HIV/ AIDS programs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, $26 million from a program to house AIDS patients, and just over $1 billion for programs to fight HIV and AIDS abroad. A report from the global anti-AIDS group ONE estimated that the cuts could lead to hundreds of thousands of new infections.

While a final budget has not passed Congress, most of the proposed cuts were not approved by congressional appropriations committees — other than the cut to the housing program, which was approved by the Senate but not the House.

Under Trump’s budget proposal, the U.S. would have invested almost $300 million in expanding abstinence-only sex education, which has been found to be ineffective at stopping the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act would also hurt people suffering from HIV and AIDS, Schoettes said. More than 40 percent of Americans being treated for HIV are receiving treatment through Medicaid, which would face steep cuts if GOP health care plans eventually replaced the Affordable Care Act.

The development of new anti-retroviral drugs over the years has made HIV and AIDS far less deadly in the U.S. But the epidemic still kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide each year — with the highest body counts in Africa, where only about 60 percent of people infected with the virus receive treatment.

Ernest Hopkins, the director of legislative affairs at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, agreed with the administration that the dismissals to the advisory council were routine. But he said the move raised red flags when considered alongside the budget cuts and the lack of staffing.

“We’re worried it could be yet another signal that this president and this administration are de-prioritizing HIV at a time when we’re making very significant progress in reducing the number of infections,” Hopkins said. “The resources to continue that work need to be secure.”